Economics of climate change must be rooted in real-world scenarios

The truth is that carbon taxes were never designed to eliminate fossil fuels, just to make them more expensive. I doubt that any economist would argue in 2024 that carbon taxes are the only solution to climate change. However, it is worth recalling that for decades, economists were vocal in their opposition to policies beyond carbon taxes. Nordhaus, who later won the Nobel Prize for economics, was one of the chief developers of the integrated assessment models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its climate scenarios. In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios”, leading Earth systems and climate scientists concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic ... at even modest levels of warming”.